Opponents of the war in Iraq, both original critics and the mea culpa recent converts, have made eight assumptions. The first six are wrong, the last two still unsettled.
His conclusion:
Our military cannot be defeated by either the Islamists or their autocratic supporters. We have the right strategy of hunting down terrorists, securing the homeland, and insidiously, but carefully, promoting democratic reform in the Middle East (an impossible notion, by the way, with the sinister presence of an oil rich and genocidal Saddam Hussein, given his history of attacking four of his neighbors.)
We have even articulated, at last, an exegesis of the dangers of radical Islam — why it hates Western freedom and how it thrives on the oil, misery, and dictatorship of the Middle East.
There remains this last unknown — how well can a liberal democracy, in its greatest age of affluence, leisure, and self-critical reflection, still fight a distant war against emissaries of the Dark Ages who seek to behead apostates, blow up democrats, and silence with death writers, journalists, and cartoonists. It is not just our democratic values versus their IEDs, but whether our idealism still has the resilience to defeat their nihilism.
Or put more directly: Can Western enlightenment and power, embedded in deep cynicism, still prevail over ignorance and self-inflicted pathology energized by fanaticism?
Read over his list and counter-arguments. The most important of course is that we are winning and only if we insist on believing the false charge that "we can't win" will we actually fail to win. Winning and losing is not an objective fact to identify. It is an outcome that we and our enemies influence--and given our success it is ours to lose.
I like this article because it puts in focus a criticism of my blog that I read on some German site. I had to auto-translate it so I may have gotten it a bit wrong, but the gist was that I defended the entire war effort without question. Now, it seemed to compliment me in saying I offer coherent criticism, so I shouldn't complain. But I don't feel like I don't question any decision. I freely admit we've made some mistakes--but they do not rise anywhere near to the level of incompetence as war critics charge. They simply represent the normal friction of war.
And for most critics of the war effort, I feel they simply don't want us to win and that their real objective is winning the White House or Congress. Some are downright sympathetic to the Islamists and feel their anger is at least justified even if their methods are to be regretted. So given that critics don't in my opinion offer criticism to help us win, I tend to be unsympathetic to their cries of error, you might say. It has been one plastic turkey issue after another raised by people who don't know anything about the military that they didn't learn watching M*A*S*H reruns.
Indeed, the Rumsfeld issue is the war in a microcosm. I'm not a huge fan of Rumsfeld in many ways. Indeed, I was quite worried about his views on the Army prior to 9/11. But I think he has done a good job in managing the military since 9/11 and calls for his resignation are not about managing our defenses more effectively. The Opinion Journal (via Real Clear Politics) put it well:
The anti-Rumsfeld generals have a right to their opinion. But there's a reason the Founders provided for civilian control of the military, and a danger in military men using their presumed authority to push elected Administrations around. As for Democrats and their media allies, we can only admire their sudden new deference to the senior U.S. officer corps, which follows their strange new respect for the "intelligence community" they also once despised. U.S. military recruiters might not be welcome on Ivy League campuses, but they're heroes when they trash the Bush Administration.
Mr. Rumsfeld's departure has been loudly demanded in various quarters for a couple of years now, without much success, and on Friday Mr. Bush said he still has his every confidence. We suspect the President understands that most of those calling for Mr. Rumsfeld's head are really longing for his.
Most opponents of the war just know that it is politically safer to target Rumsfeld than the war itself. The former sounds like they really want to help us win. The latter like they just want to help us lose. In the end, their choice of targets is just a perception management issue as far as I'm concerned.
Let me wrap by quoting Hanson again:
What we need, then, are not more self-appointed ethicists, but far more humility and recognition that in this war nothing is easy. Choices have been made, and remain to be made, between the not very good and the very, very bad. Most importantly, so far, none of our mistakes has been unprecedented, fatal to our cause, or impossible to correct.Just drive on to victory in Iraq and a lot of the criticism will dry up.
So let us have far less self-serving second-guessing, and far more national confidence that we are winning — and that radical Islamists and their fascist supporters in the Middle East are soon going to lament the day that they ever began this war.
